P.S., Inc - private management for public schools

Reason, June, 1994 by John O'Leary, Janet R. Beales

Will private management teach the public schools a new attitude toward education?

When the bell rings at Baltimore's Harlem Park Community School, children swarm the hallways. Their voices rise and fall in a cacophonous chatter, echoing down the hall. To the casual observer, it appears no different from any other inner-city school. But Harlem Park is a public school run by a private company, and the changes taking place inside are reverberating down the corridors of American public education.

Harlem Park is one of nine public schools in Baltimore operated by Education Alternatives Inc. In Minneapolis, the new superintendent is a consulting firm. In Massachusetts, the public-school system has brought on 13 private organizations, including the Whittle Corporation's Edison Project, to design and run 15 new schools. Across the country, officials are asking private companies to manage public schools and teach everything from remedial math to Japanese.

It's like the Post Office hiring Federal Express to carry the mail: It's not supposed to happen. A public monopoly is supposed to protect its territory, not contract it out. But under withering criticism and the threat of competition, public schools have finally stumbled onto something that works: capitalism. Contracting for school management, once unthinkable, is now a mainstream idea.

President Clinton, in his 1994 State of the Union address, promised to "empower individual school districts to experiment with ideas like chartering their schools to be run by private corporations." A few days later, Assistant Secretary of Education Thomas Payzant told Congress, "If communities want to hire companies to come in and help their schools, they ought to be able to do so." Such statements are remarkable, since the teachers' unions, one of Clinton's most important sources of support, are vehemently opposed to school contracting.

Inner-city schools are leading the movement toward contracting. In 1987, Kurt Schmoke became Baltimore's first elected black mayor, pledging to improve that city's troubled school system. Frustrated with the public-school bureaucracy, in 1992 Schmoke prodded the city to sign a five-year contract with Education Alternatives Inc. (EAI) to manage one middle and eight elementary schools. The school district can cancel the contract at any time if EAI fails to meet its expectations.

Armed with the experience of running a single public school in Dade County and an innovative curriculum known as Tesseract, Minneapolis-based EAI took on the task of turning around some of the most troubled schools in the city. To accomplish its mission, it had the same per-pupil funding as the average Baltimore city school--about $5,900 a year, a modest sum for urban public schools though slightly higher than what other Baltimore elementary schools receive.

"We wanted to compare their approach with some of the other approaches that we have in our school system," says Schmoke. "They really made us an offer we couldn't refuse. For the same amount of money that we are currently spending per pupil, they would increase academic performance, improve the support side of schools, and make a profit for the firm."

Across the street from the Harlem Park Community School, about one in four row houses is boarded up, their bleak stoops serving as benches for the area's homeless. Unemployment in the neighborhood tops 30 percent. At 10 a.m. the streets are eerily quiet, since the largest local industry--the drug trade--doesn't really pick up until late afternoon.

But inside the Harlem Park Community School, as at all Tesseract schools, "morning meeting" begins at 8:30 a.m. sharp. Lasting about 20 minutes, it serves as a wake-up call, a pep rally, and a social ritual that parents are invited to attend. A typical meeting includes a group song, school announcements, and an upbeat message from the principal stressing the theme that "every child can learn." Morning meeting strives to build a sense of identity and community, uniting students and teachers of various grades and instilling a sense of common purpose.

A more tangible difference can be seen in the classrooms. EAI has put four computers in every classroom (first grade and up), in addition to a new computer lab with more than 35 machines for each school. The computers are not toys or outdated hand-me-downs from local businesses. Each one includes a color monitor, mouse, headphones, and CD-ROM. These are networked, integrated, lean, mean, learning machines--a central component of the overall curriculum.

"It has been a tremendous change, and a good change," says Bernadette Key, a teacher at Rodham Elementary, one of the EAI schools. "I have been in the system for 20 years, and I have never seen it work like this." Key is monitoring a class of 8-year-olds as they tap away on their keyboards, working on individually paced reading and math programs. Assisted by an intern, she manages one of the school's two computer labs. She occasionally interrupts the interview to assist one of the 30 second-graders with math or reading questions.